Tom Rogan is an American writer and Steamboat Institute fellow based in Washington DC. He's a columnist for The National Review, a contributor to The McLaughlin Group and has written for The Guardian, The Week, The Spectator, The American Spectator, CNN, Fox News, The Washington Times and The Atlantic. He grew up in London and was educated at King's College London and SOAS. He tweets @TomRtweets.

An Anglo-American mongrel's perspective on the Washington swamp

I’m something of a mongrel. I’m an American, but I grew up in the UK. And I’ve been indelibly shaped by my British upbringing.

Sure, I love baseball, chicken wings and optimism. But I also love surreal humour and queueing.

I love that America has hundreds of TV channels, but I also take great pleasure in muting the relentless adverts.

I admire Truman for his lack of pretension and Churchill for his fiery disdain.

And now I’m in Washington DC. The place I affectionately call "the swamp within a swamp".

I say "affectionately", because swamps aren’t necessarily bad. In fact, just as wetland swamps are crucial to nature’s health, Washington DC is a place of much goodness. There are, after all, many talented people here. There are the Secret Service agents who protect America’s leaders without regard to politics. There are the Intelligence officers and military personnel who struggle against a fanatical bureaucracy in order to protect America. There are thousands of policy professionals who have chosen idealism over wealth.

Of course, there’s also a smelly side to this swamp.

Perhaps inevitably, the relationships between politicians, journalists and lobbyists are sometimes less than unimpeachable. In Congress, a seat on an Intelligence Oversight Committee doesn’t demand intelligence and elected office doesn’t require humility.

In Washington, the need to sell something becomes an end in itself. So many DC conversations begin with a tripartite formula:

1) "How’s it going?"

2) "What’s your name?"

3) "What do you do?"

Question three is the measuring stick of Washington utility – "Are you useful to me?".

Looped in to a TV cycle in which viewers are pursued with shameless audacity, many people in Washington have no qualms about subconscious networking and ludicrous snap judgments. For example, my British accent tends to be regarded as my greatest asset. It doesn’t matter what I say, it just matters that I say something.

"Britishness" somehow implies "cleverness".

But if this is the DC at its "keeping up appearances" silliest, it’s also true that this town is a great place. Whether you're watching ice hockey at the Verizon centre or spending a day in the oven of Nationals stadium, Washington is always a city as well as a Capital. For all the fake bonhomie, the vast majority of Washingtonians are kind, outgoing and genuine. I’ve made many good friends here – people I admire and respect.

One story sums it up.

When I first arrived in Washington in 2012, I knew very little about the American media industry. I had much to learn. And yet, in short order, I got in contact with a prominent Washington journalist (I won’t mention the name, that would be "too DC"). This individual did not know me and could garner no advantage from our meeting. Yet without hesitation, he/she spent an hour over coffee, explaining who to pitch to, what to focus on and how to develop a profile.

What I learned from that meeting gave me a shot in the swamp – a chance to get to know Washington for what it is; a place of imperfect power and brilliant contradiction.